Wahoo Elemnt vs Garmin Edge 820: Maps and Basic Navigation

The result? Well. Before you can run, you need to walk. Both of these get a rating of 'still crawling' when it comes to the user experience I had filming this. Don't get me wrong, they're great for their core features..... there's a long way to go before I'd be comfortable recommending an entry level user rely on navigation!

Keywords: Garmin Edge 820. Wahoo Elemnt. Garmin Navigation. Elemnt Turn by Turn.
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[Freddy]

I can at least share my experience as I used my Garmin 705 and Edge 1000 quite a bit for navigation.

1. It is important to get a good quality gpx file to start with. I used to build the routes on Strava pretty detailed, which takes a lot of time. A good alternative is brouter.de/brouter-web/ you just click the points where you want to go and you can adjust the route to avoid a few areas you don't like and select a profile like "fast-bike" which sorts out the crappy roads. Only downside if you download the gpx file they give the track a generic name. So you have to open it in notepad and change the track name, so you find it on your head-unit.
2. If you want "fast" calculation and the map only view is enough turn off turn guidance. The track will simply display on the map and on my garmin it takes 2 seconds for a 65km route.
3. If you want to use turn guidance calculation speed is 2min for 65km on my edge 1000
4. With turn guidance to enjoy the ride without staring at the map put the data field "Dist. to next" on your data screen. It shows the distance to the next turn and 150m before the turn the "turn guidance" pops up automatically. This is my prefered mode as you can see that you can simply follow the road for several km without worrying and just enjoying the ride
5. If you want to go back on the Garmin and do not need turn guidance just go into the map view and it shows your already ridden path with a blue line and you can just follow that home. No mapping needed and if your route was not perfect on the way there you can always change it by yourself without any head-unit warnings
6. Always make sure that route recalculation when taking a wrong turn is off or at least the head-unit will ask if you want to recalculate. Auto recalc. is just the worst
7. If you want to take a short cut or something and you get the warning "off-course" make sure to touch the screen at least once as long as the warning is there the map does not refresh on my edge 1000 which left me confused for the first few times.

So in summary once you have a good gpx source and know a few hints at least I can have a pretty good experience with it where you enjoy the ride and not always are worried about getting lost.

[dal]

I am exactly with the same view as you Shane. It's unbelievable that manufacturers can charge a premium for poor, unintuitive, unresponsive navigation head units. They are using nothing more than dated tech and I suppose we are the fools for buy it. The units are great for stats but nothing else.
My Garmin 810 I bought for the purpose of navigation is awful. For rides I need to navigate, I have to clamp my Galaxy S7 to my bar to get decent navigation. The whole purpose of buying the garmin in the first place was to do away with a large phone attached to the bar and have the benefit of better battery life.
I wish a phone manufacture would bring out a compact phone with great battery life and is themed around activities. This would shake up or kill off companies who charge ridiculous prices, for as I said, old and inadequate tech priced at a premium.

[michaelcreek]

Moral of the story! Never forget your phone. 😂

[StephenCunningham]

Head units are a joke in 2018. There are plenty of cyclists who spend top dollar on gear. Garmin has been doing maps for years and still isn't even close to getting it right. Wahoo is just trying to catch up to where Garmin pretends to be. Someone needs to step up to the plate and create a device that works (most likely android based). I've been a Garmin user for years and hate the company with a passion, it pains me to buy units from them. I beg someone to make a good device and take my money.

[nickcory]

Hi - thanks for this video, Shane. I found it while searching for information on the subject. I'm out to buy "something" but the market seems very confusing and there's a lot of potential to spend subsantial money on incompatible or unusable components. I've looked at many videos and other reviews in the web but your video is the best direct comparison I've seen. Today I don't have even a basic bike computer. I use only the Strava app on my Android phone, which resides in my jersey pocket. If I'm not sure of the way, I have to stop and pull out the phone. I'm looking for a setup that I can use outdoors but also for a budget Zwift zPower setup on the turbo trainer, such as you nicely demonstrated in another video. I would like to have in-ride navigation to handle my frequent, spontaneous detours while still getting me to my destination. I definitely demand Strava compatibility but I also need indoor speed sensing. The Strava app cannot hook up to speed sensors, it's totally GPS dependent and they don't plan to change that.
You've cleared up some confusion for me with your honest comments... both devices, with their quite different underlying philosophies, fall short in some major way: with the Edge it's the navigation, with the Wahoo it s the intuitiveness of the user interface.
The main message that I take away from this video is that a buyer has to decide whether a bike computer or an in-ride satnav is their first priority. No device combines both functions adequately. The ELEMNT seems to be a solid bike computer with "back office" support from the phone app, which I think is an interesting way to exploit the advantages of both. The Edges seem to be downgraded automotive satnavs with a bit of bike computer and a good deal of gimmickry thrown in. (I've used the same little Garmin Nüvi in my car for almost 10 years, the maps are always up to date and although it's slow to find the satellites and calculate a route, it's perfectly adequate for those occasional longer journeys into unfamiliar parts and looks remarkably like an Edge.)
The second point I get from your video is that navigation software for cyclists is lagging way behind automotive navigation, which is hardly surprising given that the market is probably 100x or 1000x larger for automotive users, depending on country. These automotive-derived algorithms seem to have an inbuilt tendency to prefer main roads over cycle paths and to get easily lost, but more on that later.
The third point, mainly from the comments on this video and on Strava, is that any bar-mounted device has to cope with extreme vibration and shock and I'm sure that I don't want to subject my expensive smartphone to that. The reliabilty of electronic devices is linked mathematically to their internal component count. Everything that I've read and heard about the Garmin Edge series tells me that these devices are derivatives of automotive satnavs and cannot take the beating on the bars. A simple, robust head unit coupled to a phone in the jersey pocket is going to live longer.
The fourth point is that live navigation requires large memory, significant processing power, a lot of battery and a colour display whereas cycling computer functions and long battery life point to a two-tone LCD or electronic ink display.
The fifth point - and this is also true for using your phone - is that touch screen displays are pretty, but pretty useless while you're riding, don't work when wet (rain, sweat) or when overheated from the sun, don't work when you have gloves on (yes, I ride in winter). Chunky side buttons are required, but inevitably these give less functionality.
The sixth point is that although a smartphone can be anything that the app makes it, a phone is overkill as a bar-mounted bike computer and the permanently-on display will drain the battery in a couple of hours. In any case, on long tours I don't want to see the kilometres slowly counting away, it demoralises me. But I'd like to have Strava "live segments" egg me on during a ride and to see my speed and cadence.
So back to navigation... I've read and heard a lot about preparing a route pre-ride on this or that map service, some of which you can't try before you buy, then uploading the route to the head unit. Strava's route planner (only on the computer, not included in the app) can do a good job for routes under 200km, with the ability to edit waypoints interactively to suit your preferences. I've not yet found any another route planner which allows me to plan a route interactively using OSM, adding my own preferences to take in interesting features along the way - but no doubt another commenter will know of some. The Strava app doesn't set out to offer live navigation. You can follow your progress on the display along a stored route at the cost of short battery life and it doesn't have audio output to give directions when the screen is off, but it has a useful "get you home" button that seems to choose sensible routes, whereas Google Maps doesn't. I've not found any way to interactively tune a Google Maps route. What I have found with GM on my phone is that it makes bizarre choices when initially calculating a route and when recalculating the route after an in-ride detour. Yes, it is in cycle mode, but it gets utterly confused. It doesn't clearly distinguish between roads, cycle paths, forest footpaths and deer trails. It will send you off-road in very strange ways along the least suitable, even invisible tracks and yet it also tends to get itself "glued" to main roads when there are more obviously suitable (often signposted) cycling alternatives. At times it's shouting left, right, left, right in a continuous babble of senseless instructions. But then again... signposted cycle routes are often not the shortest, more often than not they're indirect "scenic" or traffic-calmed routes and round here at least they're often only suitable for wide tyres, so you frequently find the satnav and the signposts pointing opposite ways. Most detestable is GM's ability to send you down cobbled streets when there are asphalt alternatives... do they think we actually enjoy pavé? Then it's good to have an old fashioned 1:50000 paper map in your jersey pocket to gain an overview, something not even a large tablet display can give you. So I conclude that GM is pretty useless for cycling, but I haven't yet found any other in-ride navigation tool that is try-before-you-buy.
So that's the rub. You can prepare a hand-optimised route at home, upload it to your head unit, then slavishly follow it during your ride with no detours to take in interesting things that you spot along the way. Or you can buy an expensive satnav device (at high risk of being disappointed) to get poor-quality in-ride navigation and be subjected to its strange choices, low performance and mechanical fragility. It seems that nobody offers a reliable in-ride, cycling-optimised navigation. This may be partly down to the bias of automotive-based algorithms with their limited options "shortest time", "shortest distance", "least fuel"; partly down to incomplete mapping of cycle routes (with quality indicators) or partly down to the fact that there are just too many flavours of cycling routing preference for the software to cope with: commuting and shopping, gentle Sunday family touring, ambitious cross-country treks on wide tyres, long asphalt tours on the road bike.
I'm still no closer to choosing what to buy!

[yorocco]

Thanks for this review. I was just about to splurge on a Garmin unit, but, now I think I'll use my phone. ;)

[bertb]

Shane - thanks for your review and comments. Agree that there remains a huge unmet need in the market for simple, easy-to-use navi bike computer. I guess I'll just keep persevering with my old Garmin 800 ...

[hasnain]

i had a garmin 810 nd i would use navigation all of time to ride around central london. i had no problems navigaing around and it even managed to route me through some quieter side streets/ back alleys and cycle lanes, the GPS would even locate me despite me being amonsgst skyscrapers which are notorious for messing with the signal and unlike your 820 the screen would be responsive even when wearingthick soggy waterproof gloves in winter, the only issue i had was that my maps werent up to date and being london, new buildings and roads plus new bike lanes and no entrys are constantly being built but then the owness was on me to update the maps. maybe in their quest for a lighter, smaller headunit garmin have missed out on the basics. as for wahoo, they are fairly new to the game and these are perhaps their rookie mistakes. glad you made this video as it makes me not want to upgrade to the 820 and stick with what i know.

[anon]

Never mind, you found the setting! Companion app now has a reroute to start function, as well as a dynamic address/POI search function which will create maps and zap them to the Elemnt head unit on the fly. Really useful.

[johncavanagh]

So in the battle of Elemnt vs 820....Quadlock wins.

[teis]

Have a Wahoo Elemnt Bolt. Very pleased with it.

[thorstenkreuzer]

Thank you so much for this video. I would like to take it as an opportunity to share my experiences with my Garmin 820. Good things first. There are lots of functions on the device and it is extremely customizeable. Not to forget the Garmin app store to even extend these. There are widgets like accu weather with rain forecast or data fields like strava suffer score. For those casual riders pedaling without watt meters meters you can estimate virtual power. Lots of graphs or dashboards make it fun or very effective using one of the 10 screens.
The device is of perfect size for me and well readable at any time. Battery lasts good 6 hours when using it intensively
A nice tip: put a file startup.txt in the root folder of the device with some lines of plain text content and you will be able to display e.g. some device owner infos at startup. This worked for the 800 and also for the 820 now.
Now negative issues:
Garmin released the 820 and promised to improve the touch screen issues and the calculation times for routing. After several firware updates I have to sum up that the changes were marginal. 4 to 8 min to calculate your route for a 30k to 100k ride is much to long. If you miss a turn you will be informed quickly about you riding off course but recalculating takes very long again. When heading for a target address entered on the device I often face that problem because Garmin's route is not always optimal so I correct it a bit while riding. The update time of the map is a second thing. Regardless of the display options (level of detail) it takes a bit of too much time. I.would like to have it more responsive for turns and even smoother scrolling on the straights.
Touch screen is really bad. Using it indoor is no problem. Everything works fine. I point this out as my experience is that when using maps the device performance goes down. Sometimes I am not able to change the training screen at all. Switching the display off and on again helps a little bit. But what does Garmin think - look not so pro when challenging a strava segment and tapping and swiping on the screen like a maniac. The device should support me enjoying my sport. Best way to do so would be to do that perfectly without noticing any malfunctions. Using apps and or custom data fields from Garmin IQ Connect store seems to enhance the problems. Very very sad about that. Older models or the Edge 1000 seem to work way better. What is the sense of an open developer community when their work is not useable on the device. Garmin please help. The hardward should deal with the requirements. Edge 5*, older 8* and the 1000 show less problems, so I hope for a software side improvement. There is so much potential in this device please don't let it die for touch screen and performance issues.
Last thing to mention is that read some comments about the touchscreen easily cracking when the device is dropped. As to my experience this is not the case. I dropped it driving about 25kmh (holding in hand) and it smashed on a comcrete wall without much of scratch. The issues I have with my 820 exist since the day I bought it in october 2016.

Any comments or helpful advices are welcome.

[jacklafleur]

Great to have met you at ZHQ yesterday, Shane. I, too, struggle with head units and utilizing them for navigation as it is far too cumbersome to plan out a route, upload it, set the screen correctly, etc. I have used Edge 500, 510 and 520, none of which have presented a viable navigation interface.

[TheBrandongreen]

Thank you Shane for consumer friendly reviews!

[pavlos..]

Used to do the Cape Solander ride from Maroubra all the time. You have to get on the road, not the bike paths and join a group of people riding to Kurnell. Forget the Garmin, join a bunch and chat. I had no idea where I was going, but people explain. Best bit was my number 1 memory of Sydney. Non stop aircraft noise. What a hole!

[roxic]

Agreed. I spent $600 (US) on the Garmin 1000. After seeing how un-intuitive it was, I returned it. To me it wasn't worth it. The computers should be much further ahead than what they are giving us.

[wilfriedw]

you are so right... the standard of bike navigation is so yesterday! Finally I use wahoo for my data and the iPhone with a extra battery for navigation....

[kherchia]

I think all GPS devices are still pretty much not up to scratch. But you have showed that clearly with these two particular units.
Thanks for the effort! :)

[Bandyrobs]

Agree with you the touch screen on the 820 is shocking!

[sambrown]

Oh no. I have just ordered an Element.... I guess I will have to join Ride with GPS as well. Thanks Lama for the help